1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to communication devices and in particular to displaying presence information in communication devices.
2. Background Technology
People use a variety of communication devices, such as personal computers, landline telephones, wireless telephones, PDAs, laptop computers, set-top boxes and other communication devices. Using these devices, people may communicate via voice calls; email; SMS (Short Message Service) messages; EMS (Enhanced Messaging Service) messages; MMS (Multimedia Message Service) messages; voice messages (also referred to as instant voice messages, VoiceSMS messages and Vnotes® messages); podcasts; audio files; video files; and/or other types of communications.
Typically, some sort of audible and/or visual notification accompanies these communications. For example, wireless telephones may ring for incoming telephone calls and may flash an LED and/or beep for received SMS messages. Some communication devices may include user-configurable profiles that define what (if any) notifications should be used for such communications.
In many cases, such as where a user relies primarily on a single communication device for his or her communicating needs, the user will simply leave all notifications enabled at all times to ensure that the user will be able to respond to important communications. Unfortunately, this allows all communications—whether important or trivial, whether urgent or not—to be received and thus permits the trivial/non-urgent communications' notifications to unnecessarily disturb the user.
In other cases, a user may want to disable notifications, but may simply forget to do so, thus permitting the notifications to unnecessarily disturb the user.